Perplexing...poorly developed plot or deeper meaning?

Rating: Null/10 (28 October 2003)

***I will warn that all of my comments in this review will be spoiling to some degree***
This film threw me for a loop, and I am unsure whether this is because there are gaps/loopholes in the plot, or that there truly is a deeper meaning present within the work that I am so desperately trying to ascribe. I will state my difficulties with the story as I see them:
I found it interesting that there were dozens of dead bodies stacked up in the church that our protagonist enters in the beginning of the film. Two questions came to mind upon seeing this scene. First, why are all of the people dead inside the church, while there are no dead bodies in the streets? Furthermore, why are there so many dead bodies in the first place? I was under the impression that, upon infection, an individual's only desire is to infect others (not to eat them alive, not to kill them, but only to infect them). It would then follow that no one would directly die from the RAGE outbreak; they would only risk infection. Why, then, were so many people dead at the onset of the disease? They would not be dead from getting the infection, as it was made clear that the only way infected humans CAN die is by starvation (which further supports the idea that the infected don't desire to kill others to eat their flesh or anything). **So ultimately, my question is this: who are the dead people in the church, why are they dead in the church (as opposed to the street), and how did these people die?
I was also confused about the living status of the infected. Most other reviews of this film have indicated that the infected should be viewed as zombies (i.e. unliving). That would make sense, as any living human could not throw up as much blood as the infected humans do and live for very long. However, if they are unliving, why would they ultimately starve to death? I would certainly hope that the infected are in fact being portrayed as living, because it would certainly seem more plausible to me that a virus such as RAGE could be transmitted from a live, physically healthy monkey to a human who becomes physically and mentally affected by the disease, but is not caused to become undead from it. In any event, this aspect of the story was unclear to me as well.
I would love to discuss the unclarity of these issues with someone else who is interested. I feel as though I may be trying too hard to ascribe hidden meaning to a movie that had nothing of the sort, and truly is just a zombie horror film. The movie itself has been the object of much of my thought since I saw the film a week ago, and so my deep affectation demands attention. What do you think? Feel free to contact me.